Clara at the Edge

by Maryl Jo Fox

  She squints into the bleached sun low on the horizon. The intense desert light, even this early, is merciless. There’s no shade! Does it even rain here? Signs say, Wells, 68 miles south; Twin Falls, 48 miles north. There’s a Chevron, a Shell, a video store, drugstore, couple of motels, liquor store, 24-hour market/convenience store, and several blocks of mobile homes and prefab houses painted Easter egg colors. They all straggle out on either side of Highway 93 from Desert Dan’s, whose parking lot and huge neon sign dominate the landscape. Smaller casinos hover nearby in nestlets of cars:—the Lucky Clover, the Sun, the Straight Flush. Beyond is plain, no-nonsense desert, a vast weedy plate rimmed by distant low mountains. A medium wind never lets up.

  She walks out past the mobile homes, the stucco numbers, the short streets named Black Jack, Hi-Lo, Keno, Double Down, Lady Luck, and onto the desert floor—through hunkered-down weeds, gray-green sagebrush mounds, parched gray dirt littered with beer cans, spent bullets, shredded tires, cigarette butts, and old dried condoms. Her heart rattles in her chest. What is this place anyway? Frank will be busy with his own life. He won’t want to spend much time with her. She knows that. She’ll have to catch him on the run. What will she do here? Will she even have a friend? With a pang, she thinks of her best friend, Abigail Morton, moving to Syracuse to be with her children after the petition drive against the mall failed.

  Circling back to the parking lot, she stares at her uprooted house. It stands bereft and hallucinatory above all the cars. Its dirty white siding, faded green trim, and hexagon windows shimmer mirage-like in the early morning heat. After all the aluminum trailers and stucco houses she’s just seen, her house, made entirely of wood, seems freakish out here, unfit for the harsh desert. It looks naked. Termites will eat it. Marauding ants. Unnamed predators, hungry for porous wood. In the parking lot, she squats to tighten a shoelace. She wants to get inside.

  Some young guy with long dark hair and cloggy breathing (allergies, she thinks) sticks his head out from behind an SUV. She glances up. Their eyes meet for an instant, hers wide in surprise. He stares hard at her crouched form, daring her somehow, as if he were born to hate the sight of her. Her skin prickles. She stands abruptly and bolts toward her house and the low-hanging sun. He smirks and spits a big brown loogie onto a silver Taurus, then darts back behind the SUV. Her heart races. She will erase this moment.

  She climbs the steps to the rickety screen door and peers through the half window. Oh, good. Frank unpacked the kitchen table and chairs from the U-Haul. She can eat at her own table again like a semi-normal person. He’s probably off to see Scotty, who said Frank could work the change booth until he heads off to Mexico.

  Just as she’s ready to go inside, a tall, sharp-eyed woman carrying a leather shoulder bag approaches her. She’s dressed in worn tan chinos and a black T-shirt, her long straight hair in a loose bun. She smiles. “This your house?” Her bag is busy with zippers and compartments.

  Clara is wary. “Yes. Why?”

  “I wonder if I could take a few pictures. I like the way it looks here.”

  Hungry for breakfast, Clara frowns. “Are you a photographer?”

  “Why, yes. I’ll give you my card.” She zips open a compartment in the leather bag.

  “I really need to get inside and eat. Maybe some other time.”

  With a beseeching look, the woman says, “I’ll be quick. I promise.” Before Clara can object further, the woman takes a serious-looking camera from her bag and rapidly circles the house and trailer cab, taking quick shots from different angles. Clara is annoyed even as she sees the woman is skilled and fast. “Thanks. I’ve got a deadline. Don’t want to keep you further. Maybe I’ll see you around. I come to Jackpot a lot.” She waves at Clara and heads toward the casino.

  Clara turns on the generator and goes inside, vaguely annoyed by the pushy woman. She’s too hungry to face a bottled water shower before she eats. But she can’t ignore the wasps. She gets the two beef jerky jars full of frantic wasps and sets them by the sink.

  Quit starving us.

  “All right, all right. Get a grip.”

  She takes the Ball Mason jar of sugar water from under the sink and pours some into a cup with a pour spout. Carefully she sprinkles the liquid through the punctured lids. The wasps’ steady hum goes up the scale a notch or two as the sweet liquid showers them. They drink or snuffle or whatever it is they do, then clean their wings with their back legs, like flies. Their translucent lavender wings, their slender bodies with purple-and-black banding, their dark heads with microscopic eyes that seem to watch her—she thinks they are beautiful.

  In Eugene, Clara was Teacher of the Year, Citizen of the Year, Outstanding Volunteer (at the library, women’s shelter, hospice, Chamber of Commerce)—but no one really knew her. Not Abigail, her best friend, not even herself. Only the wasps—circling the driveway, buzzing under the eaves—know her. Ever since North Dakota in the barn.

  Whenever she had a problem, she would just watch the wasps fly lazily around her on the driveway until she found the solution to whatever was bothering her. If banished memories surfaced, the wasps sensed a disturbance and suspended themselves around her head like hummingbirds, as if they could read her mind. When her friends got old enough to start dying, she had her wasps.

  She catches sight of the one that always jumps higher, more excitedly than the others, the one that stung her. A purple iridescence covers its body, especially on its head. Its thorax stripes are purple and lavender, its wings shiny lavender, and its head a knockout purple shimmer.

  Back in Eugene, if this purple wasp returned to the colony with news of some discovery, the whole swarm would follow the diva into the sky, depriving Clara of their irritable hum. She listened for their frenzied return after they’d seen whatever the alpha wasp had to show them. She wanted to ask Dennis Stedman, who taught natural science at the high school, about the wasps, but Dennis would say wasps weren’t purple and she must be seeing things. So she kept the purple wasps to herself.

  Glowing and royal-appearing, they invaded her dreams. Over the years, they spoke to her, sang to her, helped her flounder out of a deep, rancid pool surrounding Samantha’s death. Hold me close, they sang, whispering in her ear. And she did hold them close and hoped she was saved.

  This purple wasp is way more intense than the others. This one returns Clara’s gaze, slows her frantic business of tumbling and dancing when Clara watches her. This wasp knows something about her, she’s sure of it—something about Samantha, on the day she died and even before. Things Clara struggles to keep buried in her deepest mental dungeons.

  The purple wasp watches Clara from inside the beef jerky jar. Entirely still, the creature sends up a little fzz every so often, as if she’s thinking out loud. The other wasps buzz and crawl about in confusion. Transfixed, Clara breathes faster, almost a pant. She fears this wasp yet needs her. She showers the wasp with extra squirts of sugar water. The creature ignores her offering and crawls away to the other side of the jar, aiming her tail disdainfully at Clara. This wasp, so beautiful and piercing and harsh, rouses a buried part of Clara’s soul, a part that holds the harrowing truth. Sometimes she feels rising hysteria. Then she chatters, can’t think straight, and Frank gets impatient with her. Thank God he’s gone right now. She can’t stand any more scolding this morning.

  Thirty-five days to change her life? What was she thinking?

  chapter 2

  Last night, Dawson Barth landed in Jackpot too. He slept in a black Camaro he stole in Pocatello, leaving behind a Ford pickup he stole in Cheyenne. He’s wandered all his life. Clara’s sudden house in the morning sun disturbed him. He didn’t want to think about its faded hominess. But he had to get closer, see if the house was even real. He stumbled out of the Camaro and went banging like a brat all the way around the house, hoping to scare anyone inside, just like he’d done last night. The house was real all right, dusty with lumpy siding. Sleepy, hungry, his mind went blank. A few minutes later, he
darted behind an SUV as he saw Clara walking briskly toward him in the parking lot.

  As she got closer, he heard her deep breathing, saw her perky salt-and-pepper gray hair held behind her ears with two barrettes, her tanned arms, her face a peach blush. He frowned. This woman was good-looking when she was younger. Now she’s probably a grandmother. He was mortified at the sharp pain this idea caused him—a grandmother he sure as hell never had. He was humiliated even to have such a thought, something a six-year-old would think.

  Wimp.

  She bent down to tighten her shoelace. He heard her tired sigh. She was going toward the old house. On her neck was a strawberry birthmark about half an inch wide. His stomach tightened. His mother had a mark like that by her right ear. He’d forgotten about it. Chomping on a Hostess cupcake from his sack, he pushed spit through the gaps in his teeth to rid them of the pudding-like goo. He spat out a chocolate-brown arc that splatted onto a silver Taurus. Her quick glance made him glower and duck. Then she was up and walking again, faster, toward her house. He raked his hair behind his ears and pulled his Chicago Bulls hat down on his forehead.

  Sitting on his mother’s lap when he was four or five, Dawson would touch her red birthmark as he nestled against her shoulder. She didn’t like him to touch it. She’d slap his hand if he did. She was always getting mad about any little thing like that. He never had a father. When he was six, he remembered she’d been really mad about a phone call she got. Stomach rolls shaking, she marched around the apartment, running her hands through her snarled brown hair. Suddenly she picked up some cups and plates and hurled them against the kitchen wall. The dishes shattered and made a terrible noise that scared him. She’d never done that before. She looked like she was going to cry, so he tried to comfort her. He climbed on her lap and patted her forehead. She slapped his hand hard. She didn’t want him touching any part of her face. Crying, he ran and hid in her closet, rich with the smell of her clothes. All that year when he was six, she would get mad every single day and lose her temper with him every minute, and sometimes she would cry and shout about things he couldn’t understand.

  One day in that awful year, 1980, she dumped him off at a Safeway in Reno. She had a few errands to run, she said. “Wait in front of Safeway until I come back,” she said. This was after she made him an early lunch of hot dogs and Kool-Aid. He waited and waited, peed his pants, was getting really hungry in the windy afternoon sun. He wanted to go into Safeway and steal some candy bars, but he was scared he’d miss his mom so he didn’t. He sat down cross-legged on the cement and rocked from side to side. People looked at him strangely. A few stopped in their tracks a minute, but no one said anything. When it started to get dark, a nice lady from the police department came and said she was taking him home to her house for the night. For dinner she fed him oatmeal and bacon.

  The next day, the lady took him to another place where they asked him a lot of questions he didn’t know or wouldn’t answer. The rest of his growing up years was all foster parents, some nice but more often mean or crazy, men that stubbed out their cigarettes on his chest or arm to make him tough, women that fed him stale Wonder Bread or spoiled cheese that gave him a belly ache. Those years were all a rubble and he didn’t want to think about it. Thinking just got him angry. He’s already been in jail four times, prison once, and here he’s only twenty-five.

  He watched Clara coming in from the desert. “Fuck,” he blurted, “must be the old lady from the beat-up house.” He didn’t know why he tied her to the house. He hadn’t seen her come out of it. “Damned old lady gimme a headache,” he muttered softly, kicking the pavement. He hitched up his pants, swaggered into the casino, swung back out again, tried to settle himself by shuffling around the parking lot, focusing on late model cars, staring at dashboard designs and buttery-smooth upholstery, swigging root beer and eating Ding Dongs from his brown paper bag. Tall and skinny with blue-white skin, he was hobbled by an elegant facial structure that cut into his tough guy pose: long thin nose, flat cheekbones, long limp hair. Like a stray cat, he rubbed up against the empty cars.

  He watched her enter the house, the sun blazing now. He was right. It’s her house. Something impossible and longed-for rose in him, something he always squelched, a feeling that could unman him. He looked around. There was no one. He wanted to run his fingers along the siding again, make sure it was real, not a mirage. The old lady wouldn’t hear him tromping around. She was probably hard of hearing.

  He ran to her house and circled it fast. The house was funky. It almost had a stink to it. It was crumbling, falling apart: gapped eaves, shingles worn thin around the edges, bumpy paint, loose rain gutters full of debris, window frames coming away from the siding. It tore his heart out.

  Back among the cars, he mulled. It’s her all right, the old lady who lives in a shoe. What the hell is she doing in a place like this? This is no place for her. She belongs behind a white picket fence. He’ll show her.

  He slid out the screwdriver he always carried in his back Levi’s pocket. Pressing hard, he made long scratches on a dirty Chevy Caprice, then on a Honda Accord and a black Lexus with gold spoke hubcaps. On each car he scratched out two letters of a word. The complete word was wheeee. He’ll be the only one who knows the letters make a word stretched over three cars. The owners will be too stupid to figure it out. He snickered, stuffing the last of the Ding Dong in his mouth, where it bulged and churned.

  Later that first day, Dawson watched a sandy-haired man drive the house across the highway. The man parked the house in the far corner of a vacant lot. It was probably her son. Another guy, tall and thin, walked ahead of the load and acted as guide. Dawson watched the two men and the old woman unload the U-Haul. He snickered: The furniture was as ratty looking as the house. But the tall, skinny guy didn’t stick it out. He wiped his forehead and slumped back to the casino after about fifteen minutes. So the old lady and her son carried in all the boxes themselves and disappeared inside the house. Later, her son crossed the highway and disappeared into Desert Dan’s.

  Dawson smiled. She’s alone now, nobody around her.

  The son probably has twenty-five pounds on Dawson, but the son is also older. It would be a good fight if it came to that. A hungry surge of adrenalin pulsed in his veins.

  Now it’s close to midnight, and Dawson stares at Clara’s house in the towering desert night. He’s down to his last three bucks; his stomach is painfully empty. He clicks his small yellowed teeth together, shoots saliva around his mouth to knock out the last Ding Dong deposits.

  He’s sitting in the black Camaro, getting calmer. He scans the horizon, looking for a sign of some kind, the low mountains invisible in the dark. From time to time he pushes his hair away from his face with a sleepy arm movement. The MP3 player he lifted from a Chicago Wal-Mart is secured to an arm band, earphones pulsing. Rap saturates every waking moment these days, an angry male rumble in the summer of 2000. He’s just another white guy who secretly likes it. His face grows wistful. He tries to remember a certain song, but he’s forgotten it.

  He wants to head to Reno, try to scare up his mother after all these years. He’s been everywhere else, always with her name, Nancy Jetta Barth, in the back of his mind: San Antonio, Albuquerque, San Bernardino, Casper, Bend, Newark, he forgets how many. Plus a couple of prison stops he doesn’t like to think about. His jaw muscles flex.

  The light in Clara’s house goes out. He dozes off, arms hugging his thin chest. At two thirty in the morning, he wakes, hungry, and remembers what he’s about. He opens the glove compartment, unfolds a paper, and scoots some white powder into a line with his folded map of the Western United States. He leans over and snorts it with his trusty plastic straw that tastes salty because he’s stuck it up his nose so many times.

  The dingy house is barely visible in the dark, a house with history, a stinking time capsule that doesn’t even belong in this tent town. What was she thinking anyway? Random losers come here for jackpots in the sky and blotto, blott
o, blotto. She should’ve stayed where she came from, Mary Poppins land. He gets out of the car, stuffs a flashlight in his back pocket, and strides across the highway.

  Hearing a sound, Clara bolts from bed, stands trembling in her nightgown, not knowing if the sound was real or from her interrupted dream: a faceless man firing a pistol into a packed concert hall, people stampeding toward the exits.

  She crosses her arms, trying to stop shivering, and grasps the sides of her breasts. What’s that awful grating noise? Frank must still be in the casino. The house is quiet and he usually snores. So the trip is barely over and now this? In the vacant lot where no one can see or hear her? The area where Scotty said nobody would bother them?

  She always stuffs nightmares into her Dream Jar, the ironclad place in her brain, and screws the lid on tight. Her Dream Jar crushes nightmares into cellular waste. Things stay tidy in her head that way. Now the Dream Jar bangs against her forehead, outside her head, making her headache worse.

  She hears a knife cutting the screen in the sewing room, across the hall from her bedroom. Samantha’s room! Sounds of breaking glass, a heavy rock hitting the floor. Weak with terror, she almost crumples, then thinks: Not me, nightmare man. I will not sink to any floor.

  She creeps into Frank’s room next to Samantha’s. Barely breathing, she peeks through the curtained window, sees someone’s profile in moonlight: someone young, surly, male, plucking glass shards out from the window frame. He’s not even trying to be quiet. He’s trying to hoist himself through the broken window but keeps slipping back. His jumping makes the house quiver, as if a giant tyrannical parent were shaking her because she’d been bad. Why are you here, what have I done, is my house against the law here? Head thrown back, he gulps the last swigs from a can he tosses on the ground. His greasy skin gleams silver in the moonlight; his Adam’s apple is huge and moving. He wipes his nose on the back of his hand, lets out an unguarded grunt as he jumps big and the house quivers.